1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a system and method for managing data (e.g., processing data, compressing data, storing data, loading data, etc.), and more particularly, a system and method for managing data (e.g., a mix of compressed and uncompressed data) in which first instructions (e.g., a set of first instructions) are used for operating on compressed data and second instructions (e.g., a set of second instructions different from the first instructions) are used for operating on uncompressed data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Memory consumption is becoming an increasingly critical problem at both the low- and high-performance end of the system design spectrum. At the low end, random access memory (RAM) consumes area, power, and financial resources. At the high end, performance is limited by effective cache size and by bandwidth into the cache from RAM, which is becoming steadily slower in terms of clock cycles of the central processing unit (CPU).
Furthermore, many of the bits that are transferred between memory and the CPU are not useful, as the values are amenable to compression. Compression removes redundancy, thus lowering bandwidth requirements and effectively allowing more data to be stored close to the CPU.
Currently, techniques are used which apply compression in an attempt to improve memory efficiency. However, such techniques apply compression relatively far down the memory hierarchy (e.g., between the lowest level of cache and main memory) in a portion of the memory hierarchy that is not very performance sensitive. Therefore, the benefits of such techniques are limited.